SquareSubs

Friday, May 4, 2018

I suppose that's one thing that's changed with us being one of the newer subgroups—there's not really the same culture of posting to blogs or IRC, and we've been using Discord over IRC for a few years now—none of the more traditional stuff is really at the front of our minds, and it leads to long periods without blogposts.

Going forward, we're trying to switch over to having all new releases be uploaded on my (Maxine's) personal Nyaa account. This is mostly because I have a better upload speed than anyone else in the group, but also to help keep our torrents all in one place, making for less searching. You can always just search for SquareSubs on Nyaa if you'd prefer, but it's a bit less trustworthy than going to my or SquareAnon's Nyaa profile directly. I apologise for any inconvenience this complexity may cause.

With that said, here's everything we've subbed since the last blogpost:

Beyblade batch is still Soon(tm), though I have been making progress on it, and I'm also pushing for SquareAnon to sub Step Jun with me but it's low priority. I'll also be gone for 2 weeks at the end of May so releases may (...) peter out for a while.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Yep, if you know us you know we (and by "we" I mostly mean "I") often forget to update this blog with the links to our releases. Hopefully this is not a big deal for you. Sorry anyway.

I'll get to that in a moment. First, I'd like to introduce two of our new staff members who have joined us recently. First up is Greg, who will help us with the proofreading, both for Dash! Yonkuro and for Yume no Crayon Oukoku. Next is Matatabimitsu, who is providing us with great translation work.

The fuck is this?

This brings me to the second bit of news, and that is the new series that we're working on: Maple Town Monogatari! Imagine Animal Crossing without human characters. Yep, it's that good.
On a different note, this is one of the very few shows from the NichiAsa timeslot (ie. Sunday morning anime) that are still unsubbed. We're making history here!
Anyway, Matatabimitsu will be translating this, with our great Maxine once again taking care of proofreading and final touches. So look forward to it! I had never heard of this show before Matatabimitsu brought it up, but it's really comfy, so I definitely recommend you check it out. (I actually found out it was aired in my country as well but that was well before I was even born)

Oh yeah, I've been asked some questions about Beyblade so it's only fair I answer them:

For the base translations of Beyblade 2002, you should hit up the gang at Hoshi no Yume. The translation is theirs so it wouldn't be right for me to distribute it in their stead.

I will take a look at Beyblade G-Revolution. From the little I've seen, the character designs seem to have gone back on track at least a little bit. However (and this should have been my policy from the very start), I will need to check out a few episodes before declaring whether I'll be working on this show. This also goes for Metal Fight.

We won't be working on Let's & Go WGP just yet. I'd rather work on one Mini 4WD-related show at a time, so first I want to finish Dash! Yonkuro. After that, since I don't want to repeat what happened with Beyblade 2002, I will first watch some of the raws for WGP to ascertain the quality of the show.

Okay so, I don't want to beat around the bush so I'll just come out and say it:I'm not liking this new season of Beyblade. From the changes in character design, to the music, to the CGI to the characters, I'm just not feeling it. I think it lost a lot of the old-school charm that the original had. I tried to get used to it but I just can't.

We're a group of fansubbers, so subbing a show we're not fans of kind of goes against the point.
I promised you guys that I would do this, and I promised the guys from Hoshi no Yume that I would take over from them and sub the following seasons. They were so kind to share with us their translation, which in turn made my job that much faster as I only had to fix a couple of things instead of starting from scratch.
However, working on a series that I don't like it's just something that I can't do. This is most of all a hobby for me, I do it because I enjoy it, and I think all the other members of SquareSubs agree. It's the same reason why I said time and time again that I wouldn't work on Medarot Damashii since I didn't like the direction it was taking right from episode 1 (Soreepeong is working on it now but even he admits that he's slowing down because the show is just not good). I hope you'll understand.

So what I'm trying to say is, as painful as it is for me to admit, we are going to drop Beyblade 2002, at least temporarily. This means that the third episode, which we released a few days ago, will be the last one from us. This could change in the future, and I will slowly work my way through the series to see if it gets better later on, but I won't make any promises.

So what will happen to this show? Well, I honestly don't know.
Hopefully, our work with the first series and Hoshi no Yume's work on the others has sparked some new interest in Beyblade as a whole, and some other group will pick up our slack and will continue subbing the show. After all, the base translation for most of the series is already done. It only need someone to check it (as there are a few errors here and there), proofread it and mux the subtitles with the raws.

Again, I'm terribly sorry for this, and I'm definitely feeling bad for all the people who (unlike me) were enjoying Beyblade 2002. You have every right to be mad at me.

This first episode took some extra time to set up everything (fonts*, styles, karaoke, etc) but from now on, it should be a bit faster.

This show is totally 80's and I love it. Get ready to DASH!*about the fonts, I forgot to attach the font we're using for the dialogue. I already fixed this so you'll see the changes starting from episode 2. Sorry about this. That said, the subtitles are still completely readable, they just use the default Arial font.